Fellini anticipates our post-modern conditions, without, however, condescending to the "weakness" of thought that is ascribed to and cultivated by those very conditions. This is something which he does by instinct, from the heart, thanks to his omnivorous desire to know, to feel, dismantling the toy which is life, touching an object, a shape, an idea then letting it fall to see what effect it has. This in order to capture the distance between what is above and what lies below, to discover the vertiginous beauty of the unknown within the familiar. The vision of Fellini does not originate from the real or from the present moment, even less from the “visible”, but rather from memory, from fantasy and from the “invisible”, the things which suddenly come into definition during the night. From the darkness, light. Just as in the apparitions of the salvific piper in 8½ or the fabulous Rex in Amarcord. The film director, originally from Rimini and winner of five Oscars, in spite of being extremely cultured, is not an intellectual. He is something more: a master of affects, extremely gifted in perceiving prior to rationalizing, putting into film the dreams and the nightmares which are both cherished by and a torment to his genius. Federico Fellini places everything on the smile of a young child: it is a personal remedy for the melancholy of life as well as being an antidote to the tragic events of the twentieth century (Fascism, World War, the malaise hidden beneath the post-war boom period).
Fifty years after the epoch making shock of La dolce vita, Fellini’s cinema continues to number a vast amount of admirers, even if his work is without heir given that it is inimitable and unrepeatable. More than anything else it is a cinematic style in search of peers which it finds or re-finds under the joyful, but also bitter, sign of an “eternal” infancy. This is the central theme of this essay, adopted in order to analyze the filmography of Fellini from a cultural point of view which is certainly wider than the big screen and which offers a detailed analysis of specific, exemplary film sequences. In this work Fellini is detracted from the equivocal concepts of a maestro described as prodigious, emphatic and “baroque” and is rather interpreted in light of his poetic sobriety, his symbolic stylization of the world, and his bold narrative and linguistic deconstructionism. This book, finding its origins in an autobiographical record of a “magic” meeting with Fellini, does not hide its debt of love towards the director who, like very few others, has become a synonym of the cinema .